PARIS — Meet France’s new conservatives, same as the old conservatives — but with a different name.

The UMP — an acronym for “union for a popular movement” — on Saturday officially changed its name to “the Republicans” after a two-day vote by members.

The party, under the leadership of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is hoping that shedding its old name will also help unload some political baggage before the 2017 presidential race.

The change has prompted some indignation in France, which people from across the political spectrum routinely refer to as “the Republic.” Some leftist opponents persuaded a court to take the case, arguing that Sarkozy was trying to privatize a French symbol.

A court ruled in favour of the conservative party this week, with a final judgment expected later in a case that could drag out for more than a year.

“I would ask of those on the left who want to deny us the name Republican, what have you done for the Republic?” Sarkozy told a cheering crowd Saturday at the party’s congress.

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/Getty Former French President and leader of France's "Republicans" and other members of the party sing the national anthem during the party congress in Paris on May 30, 2015.

Republicans across the Atlantic might not recognize themselves in their French namesakes — few here would question universal health care, reduce taxes or slash unemployment benefits.

But France’s ruling Socialist party is happy to draw the comparison. On Saturday it launched a poster campaign mocking Sarkozy, using a photo of him riding a horse that compares him to a cowboy in a reference to the American Republican Party. Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis has made a point of discussing Sarkozy’s “fascination” with former U.S. President George W. Bush, who remains an unpopular figure in France.

Sarkozy was elected to lead the UMP six months ago, returning to the political scene after a hiatus when he lost to Socialist Francois Hollande in 2012. He has made it clear he plans to use the renovated version of the party as a springboard for the next presidential election in 2017.

The conservative party chooses its presidential nominee next year. Sarkozy appears likely to face at least two rivals: his own prime minister, Francois Fillon, and Alain Juppe, another former prime minister under president Jacques Chirac.

Rachida Dati, France’s glamorous former justice minister, has hit back at the state auditor after it refused to pay for almost €9,000 (₤6,500) her ministry spent on luxury clothes, scarves, “gifts”, restaurants and patisserie while she was in office.

The Cour des Comptes ruled that the state should not pay for Hermes scarves, ties and other items, and also rejected a further €180,000 Dati’s ministry spent on “communication consulting” between 2007 and 2010, most of it going to a company run by a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French president.

Dati, whose love of designer clothes saw her appear in a Dior dress and fishnet stockings on the front page of Paris Match while in office, denied that any of the garments had been for her, saying that they were all “presents” for foreign judicial dignitaries.

One beneficiary was an “English justice minister,” she said.

Related

In its report, dated Jan 22 but which only came to public attention this week, the auditor singled out €8,959 spent on “luxury clothes, drinks, meals, purchase of patisserie, newspapers and pharmaceutical products”.

In an itemised list, the auditor underlined around €1,300 spent on “clothing accessories” and another €1,400 on “luxury gifts.” Several receipts were unsigned and many were simply described as “various.”

According to Le Point, a weekly news magazine, the auditor found that these items “had no place here.”

Dati, an MEP and mayor of Paris’s seventh arrondissement who was France’s first senior cabinet minister of North African descent, said that she was the victim of a “political cabal” of Sarkozy aides who had never liked her, and who continue to privately describe her as a “chicken thief, an Arab.”

“That’s quite enough,” she told iTele. “If they want to try and catch me out on money, bling-bling and the like, it’s not the case.”

She added: “The justice ministry never financed my personal expenses or bought me any clothes whatsoever. I didn’t live at the ministry and my spending was financed using my own money at all.”

She said the auditor “is not questioning the nature of the spending,” but is simply “saying that there are expenses concerning the justice ministry — not the minister, Rachida Dati — that were not placed in the correct accounting line.”

I did offer a Hermes scarf to an English justice minister, in the name of the ministry

Her lawyer, Aurelien Hamelle, said that “only a third” of the sum concerned high-end clothing and accessories, which were “gifts for foreign judicial delegations.”

“It’s a perfectly normal practice,” he added.

“I did offer a Hermes scarf to an English justice minister, in the name of the ministry,” Dati told Le Figaro.

“These were essentially French products that I offered to public figures, such as a tie to an American justice minister,” she said.

She insisted that all French ministers did the same. “Have a look at [Christine] Lagarde or [Michele] Allion Marie” she said, referring to France’s former finance and foreign ministers.

Dati will not be obliged to repay the sums personally, as under French law, the ministry must foot the bill.

The remaining €180,000 went to a consulting and opinion survey company called GiacomettiPeron, which is embroiled in an investigation into “favouritism and embezzlement of public funds” regarding contracts with the previous conservative government. The auditor said there was no proper mention of “services rendered” for the money.

The company is co-owned by Pierre Giacometti, a former close adviser to Sarkozy. GiacomettiPeron denies any wrongdoing.

Dati, a lawyer who reportedly made €700,00 in 2012, found herself in hot water last November for failing to pay her membership fees to Sarkozy’s centre-Right UMP party, amounting to €5,500.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/frances-glamorous-former-justice-minister-blasts-auditor-after-monetary-claims-for-designer-clothing-denied/feed0stdFRANCE-POLITICS-MEDIA-DATIOne of the key advisors to Nicolas Sarkozy called him a ‘dwarfish Napoleon’ behind his backhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/one-of-the-key-advisors-to-nicolas-sarkozy-called-him-a-dwarfish-napoleon-behind-his-back
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/one-of-the-key-advisors-to-nicolas-sarkozy-called-him-a-dwarfish-napoleon-behind-his-back#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 16:44:14 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=722803

Nicolas Sarkozy’s once all-powerful adviser mocked him as “stack heels,” “the dwarf” and “dwarfish Napoleon” who “can do nothing without me,” according to a new book.

In The Bad Genie, Patrick Buisson, the man behind Mr Sarkozy’s turn to the Right in his failed attempt to win re-election, comes across as a paranoid misogynist with a “perverse” Svengali-like grip over the former French president.

Mr Buisson was Mr. Sarkozy’s adviser grise from 2006 – the year before his election – until 2012, when he lost to Francois Hollande. A controversial figure, he used to edit the far-Right magazine Minute and was once photographed beside a portrait of Marshal Philippe Petain, the French collaborationist wartime leader.

In the book, Ariane Chemin and Vanessa Schneider, reporters with Le Monde, recount how Mr Sarkozy would obsessively phone Mr Buisson, an opinion poll expert and head of the Histoire television channel, for “reassurance”.
Mr Sarkozy would call him “my compass”, “my right hemisphere” and “a genius”. Mr Buisson would hang up, sigh and tell colleagues: “It was the Dwarf” or “that was the Small One.”

At other times he would mockingly refer to Mr Sarkozy as “little heels”, “nutter” or “airhead”. Mr Buisson would, the authors claim, have no qualms slamming the phone down on the president when he rang from the Elysee after telling him: “I’m having lunch, you’re bothering me.”

The adviser is sited as saying: “He can do nothing without me, Naboleon.” The nickname is a cross between “Napoleon” – a leader to whom Mr Sarkozy is sometimes compared – and the French term “nabot”, which means dwarfish man.

Related

Mr Buisson, the book alleges, would seek to make and break ministers – including Rachida Dati, the former justice minister, whom he called a “chicken rustler”, and Brice Hortefeux, a former interior minister, whom he called “crap”.
The authors also revealed how one Elysee aide branded Mr Buisson a “great pervert” for a writing a book called 1940-45, Erotic Years, in which he likened France to a woman “taken” by Germany. “The guy who wrote that has got a serious problem,” said Jean-Baptiste de Froment, the aide.

Mr Buisson fell out with Mr Sarkozy last year, after it transpired that he had secretly recorded all his Elysee conversations with the president. “In my life I’ve known betrayal, but rarely one like this,” Mr Sarkozy said.

Mr Buisson was sued by his former boss and a court ordered him to pay euros 10,000 (pounds 7,250) for invasion of privacy. He paid up only when the bailiffs came, ranting that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy “is behind this and is trying to destroy me”.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Today: He’s back — Nicolas Sarkozy has taken his first serious steps toward a return to the Elysée.

No matter he remains the most hated person in French politics, uniting both left and right in visceral dislike.

The former French president won the leadership vote for his Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) on the weekend. Now, pundits believe he is on track to become the party’s challenger in the 2017 elections. But it won’t be a shoo-in although no one believes François Hollande, the Socialist incumbent, has a snowball’s chance in hell.

That’s because the candidate to beat will be Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front National. Under her stewardship the former fringe party has become a serious political force, with polls indicating more than 50% of French would vote for her. This is despite suspicions about the party’s links with Russia, all part of an increasing web of connections and funding between the Kremlin and far-right and Europhobic parties in the European Union.

French politics, never a happy place at the best of times, takes on a special hysteria when Nicolas Sarkozy appears … the man some call the “elevator-shoed poison dwarf of Europe” provokes blinding rage in his critics. [His] return has been likened to the spread of Ebola and the Ten Plagues …

But, in the end, the anti-Sarko frenzy may serve him well with the French: it has already given him the stature of an outsider, fighting the establishment on all fronts – no mean feat when you’ve already been president of the French Republic for a full mandate — and neatly stealing Marine Le Pen’s USP [unique selling point].

In a blog posting, Gideon Rachman of the London-based Financial Times looks at recent opinion polls in assessing the former president’s chances.

[One] suggested that Ms. Le Pen could win the first round of the 2017 presidential election with 30% of the vote. That would be a historic breakthrough for a party that has always struggled to break through the 20% barrier in national polls.

The polls also suggest that Ms. Le Pen would then lose in a second-round contest with Mr. Sarkozy – although with a startlingly high score of 40%. Those who argue that it is still impossible to imagine France electing a far-right president should also note that the same IFOP poll in September, showed that Ms. Le Pen would win a clear victory over President Hollande – if he were her opponent in the second round. I think the real significance of that is it suggests that over half the French electorate can now imagine themselves voting for the National Front, which is a really striking political and psychological breakthrough.

The Independent’s John Lichfield says Sarko’s win was actually a disappointment. The big winner was his rival, Alain Juppé, who wasn’t running.

Mr. Sarkozy had counted on returning to fervent acclamation, like Napoleon after he escaped from Elba in 1815. He took 64.5% of the vote in an online poll but this was almost universally interpreted on Sunday as a reverse – like getting two cheers instead of three. [He got 85% last time he ran for the post].

And there was more bad news. A devastating opinion poll by IFOP for the Journal du Dimanche suggested that only 16% of French voters thought that Mr. Sarkozy provided a “serious” answer to the nation’s problems. Just 10% regarded him as “honest” and 18% as “likeable.” The tangle of 12 different ongoing criminal investigations surrounding Mr. Sarkozy’s finances have evidently taken their toll.

In an unsigned opinion piece The Wall Street Journal says Sarkozy is taking a leaf from Le Pen’s book, in vowing to stem the flow of immigrants and rein in the bureaucrats in Brussels. But this may be beside the point when like Hollande he fails to tackle tougher issues, like the sclerotic French economy.

By talking tough on the European Union, Mr. Sarkozy hopes to keep the support of voters frustrated by a stagnating economy and tempted to back Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front …

[He] took the French presidency in 2007 on the promise of bold reform. He failed to win re-election in 2012 having lost his nerve and after achieving little. Throwing rhetorical barbs at popular scapegoats such as the EU or foreign immigrants may help him compete with Ms. Le Pen. But the question voters will ask is whether this time Mr. Sarkozy means what he says about reforming the French economy.

The man who led France from 2007 to 2012 announced Friday on Facebook that he’s joining the race to lead his conservative UMP party in elections next month. The widely expected move is seen as a first step toward running for president in 2017.

Sarkozy, the 59-year-old husband of model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, faces a string of legal problems linked to corruption accusations. But that doesn’t appear to be holding him back from staging a political return.

When he left the Elysee Palace in 2012, he said he was leaving politics and would find a different way to serve his country.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty ImagesSarkozy leaves his office in a car Friday after taking to Facebook to offer disenchanted voters a "new political choice" amid a deep political and economic crisis.

Now, his successor, Socialist Francois Hollande, has become the most unpopular French leader of modern times over his handling of the economy.

And Sarkozy’s UMP party, which he led before running for president the first time, is a nest of divisions in a leadership vacuum.

So with polls showing some want Sarkozy to come back, he wrote Friday, “I have decided to propose a new political choice to the French.”

THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty ImagesSarkozy's Facebook post: "I am a candidate to be president of my political family."

“I love France too much. I am too passionate about public debate and the future of my compatriots to see them condemned to choose between the desperate spectacle of today and the prospect of dead-end isolation,” he wrote, in apparent reference to Hollande’s weak presidency and the recent rise of far right leader Marine Le Pen, who wants France’s top job.

Since Sarkozy left office, he has followed his wife’s concert tour and given speeches at international events — and been detained for questioning and faced legal charges.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: It’s almost a tradition with French presidents — they are caught up in corruption scandals after they leave the Elysée.

So it was seemingly déjà vu all over again when rumours swirled around Nicolas Sarkozy.

This time, though, it was different. In a first for France, the former president was detained for questioning for 15 hours before prosecutors charged him with accepting illegal campaign donations from then-Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a €1-million ($1.7-million) fine if found guilty. More charges could follow as prosecutors are looking at least six separate cases.

Sarkozy’s plight is attracting little sympathy in France, in contrast with reaction to the conviction of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac. Nobody batted an eye when Chirac was found guilty in a housing scandal, but handed a suspended sentence, partly because of his age and his image as a good-natured philanderer.

Presidents Valéry Giscard D’Estaing and François Mitterrand were dogged by rumours while in office, but never charged with anything. The French were indifferent.

With Sarko it’s different: The ex-president gets under people’s skin. They simply can’t stand “Monsieur Bling-Bling,” so called for his love of expensive watches and restaurants, and hob-nobbing with rich friends. Recent polls showed a slump in his popularity and that of his party, Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).

An editorial in The Guardian also sees the arrest as signaling a sea change in how the French feel about their governing class.

Past French presidents were plagued by corruption allegations during and after their terms of office. None, however, was subjected to the 15-hour police station detention to which Mr. Sarkozy was subjected this week. None was placed under notice of investigation for “active corruption,” as Mr. Sarkozy has now been.

This could either mean that the charges – which include allegations of accepting huge campaign donations from the former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in 2007 – are far more serious than those that dogged presidents Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac. Or it could mean that a bar has simply been raised, and that French public life has begun to get more transparent than it was in the past – a possibility also signalled by the recent treatment of François Hollande’s private life.

But, as Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes in The Daily Telegraph, few modern French politicians have been so unloved as Sarkozy.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand and François Hollande all had or have enemies and bitter adversaries.

But with Sarko, it’s personal. He irritates. He grates. Otherwise calm, seemingly rational people tell you, apropos of nothing, that they’d like to push a stake through his heart. Supposed friends of the common people on the Left rant about his “vulgarity.” Judge Claire Thépaut, one of his two investigating magistrates … called him a destroyer of justice and democracy in an open letter … Only Sarkozy has the power to turn calm, elderly academics such as Monique and Michel Pinçon-Charlot – sociologists who study the arcane mores of the French upper-middle class – into Marxist firebrands.

Although Sarkozy’s burning political ambition remains undiminished, that may no longer be enough, notes the Financial Times of London in an editorial.

The problem for Mr. Sarkozy is that while his ambition may not have deserted him, neither has his past. In recent years he has faced numerous allegations about illegal money-raising for his party’s campaigns. None of those allegations has ever led to a conviction. [T]he former head of state faced acute embarrassment when he was detained in police custody by an anti-corruption court investigating claims of “influence peddling.” It is thought to be the first time any former French president has been held in this way.

Mr. Sarkozy has denied wrongdoing and says the allegations are made up by his political enemies. But even before [these] events, the drip-drip of corruption claims had put his chances of a political return in jeopardy.

In the New Statesman news magazine, Myriam Francois-Serrah says Sarkozy may recover, but France’s political class will not be so lucky.

Whatever the outcome of the ongoing investigations, the damage done to trust in public officials will be long-lasting. In the wake of the Front National’s historic success in the European elections, where the party acquired 25% of the vote and more than 20 MEPs, and its relative success in earlier municipal elections, the weakness of the main parties is deeply concerning. The socialist party’s successive political failures and the UMP’s internal disarray should cause neither party to rejoice.

The real victors are the oppositional parties, which continue to capitalize on widespread and understandable apathy as a navel-gazing political class remains unable to address some of France’s most basic needs, from reversing a stagnant economy to addressing eye-watering unemployment levels of 10%. Sarkozy may still recover, but the question is whether the political class ever will.

PARIS — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s car wheeled out of the court parking lot in the dead of night Wednesday after he was charged in a corruption probe, a televised reminder of just how often France’s political elite is charged with wrongdoing in office.

The former conservative party leader, whose political comeback has been floated by his faltering UMP party, had been in custody answering questions from judicial officials. His personal lawyer, Thierry Herzog, and magistrate Gilbert Azibert were also questioned.

Sarkozy is accused of tapping political allies to gain intelligence on a flurry of probes linked to campaign finance. He has vigorously denied wrongdoing and planned to address the latest allegations on television Wednesday.

“This situation is serious. The facts are serious,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told BFM television. “But as head of the government, I’m asking that we remember the independence of the justice system, which must carry out its work serenely. No one is above the law is the second principle. And thirdly, an important reminder, there is the presumption of innocence.”

AFP PHOTO / JACQUES DEMARTHONJACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty ImagesFormer French President Nicolas Sarkozy leaves his home on July 2, 2014 in Paris. France's former president Nicolas Sarkozy has been charged with corruption and influence peddling, French prosecutors said on July 2, a dramatic move in a criminal probe that could wreck his hopes of a political comeback.

At the heart of the investigations are allegations that Sarkozy took 50 million euros ($67 million) in illegal campaign funds from Libya’s late dictator, Moammar Gadhafi. He has not been convicted.

Valls said the investigation was being carried out by the new financial crime force independently of the Socialist government, which defeated Sarkozy in the 2012 election.

“This is yet another thing to erode the image of the political class, because it gives the image of an all-powerful group that believes itself to be above the law,” said Jean Garrigues, a political historian at the University of Orleans and the Sorbonne.

Lawyers for Herzog and Azibert said the men were handed preliminary charges of influence trafficking.
After further investigation, judges will determine whether to hold a trial.

Related

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/nicolas-sarkozy-former-french-president-charged-in-corruption-probe-for-allegedly-accepting-67-million-from-moammar-gadhafi/feed3stdFormer French President Nicolas Sarkozy (L) leaves the financial crimes section, on July 2, 2014 in Paris. Nicolas Sarkozy was detained for questioning in a widening corruption probe, a judicial source said, in an unprecedented move against a former French president. Sarkozy had turned himself in for questioning a day after investigators detained his lawyer Thierry Herzog and two magistrates.AFP PHOTO / JACQUES DEMARTHONJACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP/Getty ImagesNicolas Sarkozy the first former French president to be held overnight for questioninghttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/nicolas-sarkozy-the-first-former-french-president-to-be-held-overnight-for-questioning
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/nicolas-sarkozy-the-first-former-french-president-to-be-held-overnight-for-questioning#commentsTue, 01 Jul 2014 19:31:20 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=486479

PARIS — Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was in police custody Tuesday, apparently under questioning in an investigation linked to allegations that he took $50-million in illegal campaign funds from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

But will the shocking detention and sordid case torpedo Sarkozy’s chances at a presidential comeback?

Maybe not.

Sarkozy, a political survivor who’s been touring the world with his pop singer wife, is still among the most popular politicians in France despite a pile of investigations that target him.

The 59-year-old hasn’t been convicted of anything and remains well-known on the international stage. And he may be his troubled conservative party’s best chance to regain the presidency in 2017, after losing it to Socialist Francois Hollande in 2012.

A judicial official said Sarkozy was detained for questioning Tuesday at the headquarters of the judicial police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. The official, who was not authorized to be publicly named while discussing an ongoing investigation, would not elaborate. French police, prosecutors and other judicial officials would not provide any details.

Sarkozy could be held up to 24 hours, which could be extended for another day. After the questioning, he could be released without charge, named as a witness in the case or handed preliminary charges.

French media reports say Sarkozy is being questioned in an investigation linked to financing for his 2007 presidential campaign, notably allegations that late Libyan leader Gadhafi gave Sarkozy illegal campaign donations.

The French daily Le Monde, which has covered the case closely, says the questioning centres around whether Sarkozy and his lawyer, Thierry Herzog, were kept informed about the investigation by a friendly magistrate, Gilbert Azibert.

Herzog and Azibert were also held for questioning Tuesday.

Sarkozy and Herzog have denied wrongdoing. Azibert’s lawyer told reporters he hoped the detention would be over by the evening.

Investigators are basing suspicions at least in part on taped phone conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer. The taping raised questions about the limits between investigative needs and individual privacy, particularly lawyer-client privilege. Sarkozy has compared the situation to actions by the secret police in the old East Germany.

Allies from Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party — which has been in a leadership crisis — jumped to the former president’s defence.

“They have never imposed such treatment on a former president, with such a surge of hate,” lawmaker Christian Estrosi tweeted.

Former French President Jacques Chirac was convicted in a corruption case in 2011 after he left office, but when he was questioned he was not held in police custody.

The Socialist government tried to stay above the fray.

“Justice officials are investigating, they should carry out the task to the end. Nicolas Sarkozy is a citizen answerable to justice like any other,” government spokesman Stephane Le Foll said on i-Tele television.

Political scientist Thomas Guenole said it’s too early to draw conclusions about Sarkozy’s political future.

“Nicolas Sarkozy has often been pronounced politically dead over the last two years because he was implicated in political-judicial affairs … And he has always emerged,” Guenole said.

He described an “immense love” for Sarkozy amid hard-core members of his party, who view the investigations against Sarkozy as politically driven.

Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges in another investigation into whether he illegally took campaign donations from France’s richest woman, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Those charges were later dropped.

In a separate case, relatives of French victims of a deadly 2002 bombing in Pakistan filed a complaint in Paris last year against Sarkozy and two former advisers for allegedly violating a duty to secrecy in the investigation of the case.

Judges are also investigating funding for his failed 2012 election bid, amid reports that false accounting was used to cover campaign expenses that had surpassed the legal limit. Sarkozy’s camp says he was unaware of any wrongdoing.

Despite all this, opinion polls show him in a strong potential position for 2017 election. Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on so far unfulfilled promises to boost jobs and the economy, but his popularity has lagged at record lows for much of his term.

——

Sohrab Monemi and Louise Dewast in Nanterre contributed to this report.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: It must be like the last days in the bunker at the White House.

Fresh from the unspooling disaster that is Obamacare — today’s news, many people will have to pay more for health insurance — Barack Obama is reeling from revelations the U.S. tapped the phones of world leaders, including key allies.

On one level, this is not surprising. Governments spy — have always spied — on each other because knowledge is power.

What is unparalleled is the gargantuan scope of the U.S.’s activities, as revealed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee, and his merry band of leakers. Allies, enemies, ordinary citizens are all the targets of electronic surveillance.

But the solids hit the punkah with news the NSA bugged the phones of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, and more than 30 other leaders.

The Obama administration has offered two explanations. One is pragmatic: Such counterterrorism operations help protect Americans. The other is more cynical: Many governments spy on one another.

It’s safe to say, neither has impressed media across the U.S., from The New York Timeson down

The White House response … to the expanding disclosures of American spying on foreign leaders, their governments and millions of their citizens was a pathetic mix of unsatisfying assurances about reviews under way, platitudes about the need for security in an insecure age, and the odd defence that the president didn’t know that American spies had tapped the German chancellor’s cellphone for 10 years.

Is it really better for us to think that things have gone so far with the post-9/11 idea that any spying that can be done should be done and that nobody thought to inform President Obama about tapping the phone of one of the most important American allies?

For the Torrington, Conn.-based Register Citizen, there are several problems with the administration’s response.

Some of the spying … has targeted top political leaders and diplomats, including the last two presidents of Mexico, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and embassies and offices of the European Union. The NSA apparently scooped up emails and text messages of Rousseff and her top aides, as well as Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto — something that cannot be explained away as counterterrorism.

The breezy U.S. response also overlooks the damage that revelations of spying are doing to important relationships. A furious Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington last month and her government is now busy concocting ways to lessen U.S. leverage on the Internet, including a new encrypted e-mail service. French protests may be hypocritical, but they could also lead to demands that anti-surveillance measures be included in a proposed transatlantic trade treaty.

Editorial writers at the Arizona Republic ask,“Who’s is charge?” at the operation it describes as Spies ‘R’ Us.

[W]hen it comes to outrage, there’s an underlying problem that should have Americans even more riled up. Reports that President Obama didn’t know raise a disturbing question: Is anybody in charge?

NSA responded that Obama had not been told by NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander. Several astute reporters pointed out this official denial did not specify whether somebody else might have told the commander in chief. What’s more, Obama ordered a stop to spying on some leaders this summer after launching an internal review of the program, so he clearly knew then … Someone besides the spies ought to be making the decisions about when surveillance serves a national security interest and when it merely amounts to gratuitously vacuuming up vast amounts of information.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it has authorized increasingly creepy intrusions in the name of national security, starting with the Patriot Act, which initially tracked library books citizens checked out and now authorizes roving wiretaps and searches of emails and financial records without court order.

Had Snowden not disseminated records of the spying, most Americans would never have known the extent to which their government was keeping track of their lives. His sharing of top-secret documents was criminal, and Snowden is living in Russia to avoid U.S. attempts to arrest him.

But even as he must pay for his actions, they provide an unprecedented glimpse into the U.S. government’s intelligence efforts. That view is embarrassing, a danger to American freedoms and to our standing in the world.

In an editorial, the Seattle Times says thw U.S.’s problem is compounded by another secret revealed. Getting caught is the ultimate embarrassment.

Awkward revelations about the U.S. listening in on the conversations of leaders in Germany, France, Mexico, Brazil, and now, officials in Spain, are compounded by another secret revealed: The U.S. has an agreement with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand not to spy on one another. You could call it the “English Language Pact.”

President Obama’s team got caught, and in the world of intelligence gathering that stirs the most embarrassment. Congress needs to step forward and hold the administration accountable. Regain some credibility with the public by asking hard questions.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: The French are increasingly fed up with their rulers.

Results of a new poll show them rejecting the parties of the last two presidents, the Socialists of François Hollande and the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Instead, 25% said they preferred the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, the Front National — the first time she has headed a poll for a national vote.

France’s leaning to the extreme right mirrors what is happening across Europe, with Frank Stronach’s Team Stronach in Austria, Jobbik in Hungary and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands all attracting new support.

Though the Ifop poll asked only about voting intentions for next year’s European parliamentary elections, the pollster believes similar results would obtain in any election in France itself, reports The Guardian’s Kim Willsher.

“For the first time in a poll on voting intentions in an election of a national character, the [National Front] is clearly ahead,” Ifop said.

The boost for the party comes just 10 days before the second round of a by-election in the canton of Brignoles, in the Var, southern France, in which the National Front candidate gained 40.4 % of votes in the first round.

Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur — which commissioned the poll it has dubbed “frightening” — Bruno Roger-Petit pins much of the blame on Sarkozy and the UMP, rather than the inept and ineffectual Hollande.

The rise of Marine Le Pen is first and above all the fault of the UMP and, as a result, the party’s problem … UMP voters have become increasingly radicalized, most notably over issues that are seen as attracting NF supporters — immigration, security and unemployment, especially over-lavish benefits …

People on the right — those who already vote for the FN and those in the UMP who are ready to vote FN — intend to punish the UMP for two reasons. The first is Nicolas Sarkozy and his failure on security, immigration and unemployment … The second is the battle for leadership of the party [where none of the candidates inspire confidence].

As for Le Pen herself, she is busy waging war on journalists who dare describe the FN as far right, notes Le Monde in an editorial.

This is not surprising. On the one hand, the Front National leader is following, logically, the campaign of “de-diabolization,” which has served her well for the past three years.

In shaking off the old Pétainist relics of the original FN, in disowning the anti-Semitism of her father, in insisting on her respect for institutions and embracing French secularism (even it’s only so she can denounce Islam), she has succeeded in making the FN, for many French, most notably on the right, look like a party they could actually vote for. Challenging the far-right label caps her campaign for normalization.

The Independent’s John Lichfield wonders if this strategy will pay off. French journalists have responded by gleefully using the far right label wherever possible.

Whether suing the media is good PR remains open to question, though. Her father brought similar lawsuits in 1995. The courts refused even to consider his political arguments which distinguished between “nationalism” and “populism”, on the one hand, and a xenophobic far or extreme right on the other. They said any attempt to “censor the vocabulary of journalism” would be an “abuse of the law”.

Since taking charge, Ms. Le Pen has moved the party to the left on social questions such as divorce, abortion and gay rights, and she did not campaign against gay marriage. Her new focus — anti-immigrant, anti-Brussels, anti-Islam — has drawn fresh support. But critics insist that the party’s DNA remains largely that of the neo-fascists, anti-Semites, anti-government populists and Vichy sympathisers who founded the party in 1972.

When he was getting his start in business, Paul Desmarais was told by an uncle that he could be prime minister one day. But to Mr. Desmarais, who had seen his uncle sink into depression after losing a municipal election, defeat at the ballot box was worse than bankruptcy.

“I said, ‘No, I want to be a businessman,’ ” he recounted to France’s Le Point in 2008. “ ‘If I’m bankrupt, it will be my fault. I don’t want to depend on a guy in a corner who’s going to vote against me.’ ”

If I’m bankrupt, it will be my fault

But while he never stood for election, Mr. Desmarais, who has died at age 86, was no stranger to the halls of power. From Robert Bourassa to Jean Charest, from Pierre Trudeau to Paul Martin and from George H. W. Bush to Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Desmarais cultivated close ties with provincial, federal and international leaders.

“Paul Desmarais admired political men and women from all parties,” former prime minister Brian Mulroney, a close friend, told radio interviewer Paul Arcand Wednesday. “He greatly appreciated the sacrifice that politicians had to make to advance the interests of their provinces or of their countries.”

In a 1999 profile of Mr. Desmarais in L’Actualité magazine, Michel Vastel told the story of a visit by Mr. Trudeau to Mr. Desmarais’ country estate. Mr. Trudeau expressed a desire to drive his friend’s Rolls Royce, and Mr. Desmarais surrendered the driver’s seat and hopped in the back.

NP GraphicsClick to Enlarge

“It’s the first time I’ve been chauffeured by a prime minister,” he joked.

To Quebec sovereigntists, it was actually Mr. Desmarais who was behind the wheel, using his financial clout to influence federalist governments. In a 2008 book, Robin Philpot wrote that Mr. Desmarais had “spun his web to such an extent that it now enables him to call the shots.” Richard Le Hir, a former Parti Québécois cabinet minister, described Mr. Desmarais last year as “a wolf who has understood that it is much easier to convince the shepherd to open the doors of the sheep pen than to constantly try to evade his surveillance.”

There is no denying Mr. Desmarais was friendly with plenty of so-called shepherds. Guests at a 2008 party for his wife, Jacqueline, included Mr. Mulroney, Mr. Bush, Lucien Bouchard and Jean Chrétien, whose daughter is married to Mr. Desmarais’ son.

Mr. Desmarais addressed critics of those close ties in a 1998 interview with Peter C. Newman, published in Maclean’s. “To hell with the people who say I do it for political favours,” he said.

“It has been a great advantage to say, ‘I know the prime minister of Canada, and I know what he’s thinking.’ I always thought that I couldn’t impose on political figures and ask them to do something for me and still be a friend of theirs, that if I was going to render any service to my country, I could do it by giving these guys my policy positions.”

What really upset his sovereigntist adversaries was that Mr. Desmarais was an unabashed federalist committed to defeating their project.

His first brush with the separatists came during the 1970 October Crisis when his Power Corp. was cited in the FLQ manifesto as a symbol of “the aggression perpetrated by high finance.”

Related

In 1980, a few days before the first sovereignty referendum, he told a Power Corp. annual general meeting that his business experience had taught him francophones are free to participate in all aspects of Canadian life. During the 1995 referendum campaign, he again spoke out against independence, earning the wrath of PQ Premier Jacques Parizeau, who accused him of “spitting on Quebecers” and “pulling strings in the shadows.”

Mr. Desmarais’ perceived influence extended beyond Canada’s borders. He befriended Nicolas Sarkozy in 1995, and after Mr. Sarkozy became president of France, he awarded Mr. Desmarais the Grand-croix de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur in 2008 — a rare honour for a non-citizen. Mr. Sarkozy said at the time he owed his political success to Mr. Desmarais.

When Mr. Sarkozy spoke out more directly in favour of Canadian unity than his predecessors, it was blamed on the fact that Mr. Desmarais had his ear.

Paul Martin, the former prime minister who got his start with Power Corp., dismissed suggestions that Mr. Desmarais sought to pull political strings.

“I worked very closely with him for 13 years as president of Canada Steamship Lines,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

“When I went into public life, I can tell you that as minister of finance and as prime minister, I never once discussed political issues with him, except for one, and that was in the mid-’90s when we talked about the Quebec referendum and we both agreed that Quebec had to stay in Canada.” He said Mr. Desmarais’ most memorable quality was his integrity.

Jean-Claude Rivest, a senator and former advisor to Mr. Bourassa, said Mr. Bourassa consulted with Mr. Desmarais regularly but did not shy away from taking decisions that ran counter to his business interests. Mr. Desmarais’ greatest contribution was in helping build Quebec’s reputation through his business success. “He was very useful to Quebec, but not for defining policies,” Mr. Rivest said.

On Wednesday, tributes poured in from across the political spectrum. Former Quebec premier Jean Charest, who some say was drafted by Mr. Desmarais to become provincial Liberal leader in 1998, called Mr. Desmarais “a leader of his century and of his generation.”

A leader of his century and of his generation

Pauline Marois, the PQ Premier, said, “Today, Quebec has lost one of its great builders, but the memory of Mr. Paul Desmarais will always be associated with one of the finest personal successes of our era.”

Mr. Mulroney was a young lawyer when he got to know Mr. Desmarais, who enlisted him in 1972 to resolve a labour dispute at his newspaper, La Presse.

“This is a profoundly sad moment, for me and I presume for all Quebecers,” Mr. Mulroney said Wednesday, “because he was a great leader who did great things for our province and our country.”

NICOLAS SARKOZY disclosed Tuesday that a stalker broke into his wife’s holiday home on the French Riviera last week, as the former French president hit back at criticism over the cost of his 25-strong team of bodyguards.

The stalker, a petty criminal already known to the police in his native Germany, managed to get past security and into Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s summer residence at Cap Negre on the Mediterranean coast.

A French interior ministry source told Le Figaro newspaper that the mentally “unstable” intruder wanted to meet Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy “at all costs”, describing him as “insistent”. “He would have been able to get to Mrs Sarkozy or her child, but luckily he was stopped in time,” said a spokesman for Mr Sarkozy’s office.

The break-in coincided with the release of photographs of Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy bathing in a white bikini off rocks outside her villa.

Mr Sarkozy mentioned the intruder as he sought to justify the round-the-clock presence of a large team of security agents, following press criticism over the cost to the taxpayer of guarding him while on his summer holidays.

In an article in Le Parisien entitled “The highly protected holidays of Nicolas Sarkozy”, the capital’s newspaper reported that 10 agents of the elite police protection service of high-profile public figures, SPHP, are employed to keep the former president safe.

A further five teams of three specially designated bodyguards from the CRS anti-riot force take turns to watch over Mr Sarkozy constantly, seven days a week.

In a poll on Le Parisien’s website, 61 per cent of those who responded said they were shocked by the amount of agents required to protect Mr Sarkozy.

Mr Sarkozy responded by saying that he received no special treatment.

“He enjoys the same treatment as all former French presidents, defined by a prime ministerial note in January 1985 which corresponds to the threat to a person who is or has been exposed,” his office said in a statement. “This [security] set-up is in no way defined by the person being protected but by services within the interior ministry,” it said.

The former president noted that last week’s intrusion proved the “usefulness” of his security detail. As Le Figaro pointed out, the agents may be “useful” but they are not “totally efficient” as the stalker did managed to enter the premises before being apprehended.

Mr Sarkozy was not informed of the incident until a few days after it happened.

It is not known whether the former president made any requests for shorter bodyguards, following reports while he was president that tall security agents had been discreetly advised not to apply for a job – despite their value of being able to spot potential attackers in a crowd.

Despite officially withdrawing from politics to become a speaker in international conferences, Mr Sarkozy has remained in the public eye this summer.

Last week, he and his wife were photographed dining with King Abdullah of Jordan and his wife Rania in Nice.

The previous Sunday, he was pronounced the most popular and influential political figure in France by a poll, in an apparent boost to his former ambition to run for re-election in 2017.

PARIS — A judge on Thursday filed preliminary charges against former President Nicolas Sarkozy in a campaign finance case, formally placing him under investigation over allegations that he took advantage of billionaire Liliane Bettencourt’s mental frailty to access her money on way to his 2007 election victory.

The preliminary charges were issued against Sarkozy, 58, after he went through hours of questioning in a Bordeaux courthouse, according to the prosecutor’s office. The ex-president is accused of “abuse of someone in an impaired state” in the case involving the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune heiress and France’s richest woman, who is now 90.

Related

Under French law, preliminary charges mean the investigating magistrate has reason to believe wrongdoing was committed, but allows more time to investigate. The charges may later be dropped or could lead to a trial.

Sarkozy potentially could join his predecessor and former mentor, former President Jacques Chirac, who was convicted after office. In a political financing scandal of his own, Chirac in late 2011 became the only former French leader since World War II-era Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Petain to be charged or convicted of a crime.

The charges were unlikely to have any immediate political impact. The conservative Sarkozy said his political career was over and assumed a low profile after losing his re-election bid to Socialist Francois Hollande in May. While some polls suggest Sarkozy is the mainstream right’s favoured candidate in the next presidential race, it’s not until 2017.

Still, Sarkozy’s travails were likely to take the media spotlight off political scandal that hit Hollande’s government this week, with the resignation of Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac over allegations that he squirreled away cash abroad to avoid paying French taxes.

The investigation in Bordeaux that has caught up Sarkozy centres on the finances of Bettencourt, who was once the focus of a long-running family feud over her fortune. Bettencourt, who was reported to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, has since been placed under legal protection.

Sarkozy lost his legal immunity from prosecution when he failed to win re-election. In November, he was given the status of a so-called “assisting witness,” with the possibility of facing charges later on allegations of abusing someone in an impaired state, swindling and abuse of confidence.

After Thursday’s questioning, a three-judge panel opted only to retain the first of those counts related to activity in February 2007 and throughout that year, according to the prosecutor’s office. It emphasized that the former president is still presumed innocent of any wrongdoing.

Investigating judge Jean-Michel Gentil was looking into conflicting accounts about how many times Sarkozy — a darling of the mainstream political right — visited the home of Bettencourt in the run-up to his winning 2007 campaign for president, according to one lawyer.

Earlier in the probe, Bettencourt’s ex-accountant told police she gave 150,000 euros ($192,000) to the manager of Bettencourt’s fortune that was to be passed on to Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer.

“If Mr. Gentil placed Mr. Sarkozy under investigation this evening it’s because he had a reason to do so,” said Antoine Gillot, a lawyer for Bettencourt’s former butler, who was also questioned Thursday along with Sarkozy, on French TV i-Tele. “It was a semi surprise … it means the judge has a certain number of facts.”

Sarkozy’s lawyer and spokeswoman didn’t return calls, emails or text messages from The Associated Press seeking comment about the decision Thursday. But Thierry Mariani, a lawmaker and ally in Sarkozy’s conservative party, suggested the charges were politically motivated and part of an effort to discredit Sarkozy just as polls suggest he is still widely liked and show big disappointment in Hollande — whose popularity has tanked just 10 months into his five-year term.

Since his defeat, Sarkozy has largely drifted out of the public eye, at times turning up in places like the lucrative international speaker circuit. Compared to the height of his political career, Sarkozy has seemed to shun the cameras. He reportedly entered the courthouse Thursday unseen by journalists, and didn’t comment on his way out.

Thursday’s decision contrasted with the air of triumphalism expressed by Sarkozy’s allies in November after he was named as an assisted witness — somewhere between a simple witness and a formal suspect. His defence lawyer, Thierry Herzog, at the time called that decision a “victory” and said the case against Sarkozy “no longer exists.”

———

Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report with files from Bloomberg News

There was a time, admittedly quite long ago, that France and the U.S. had a special feeling for one another. When the Marquis de Lafayette died in 1834 it was treated like a national tragedy in the U.S. French feeling for American values was so strong in the 19th century they sent a giant statue to stand in New York harbour as a salute to liberty.

Obviously the differences have grown, and the attitude towards public morality can’t be the narrowest of the divides. On Friday one of the most honoured and respected figures in the U.S. resigned as CIA director after admitting he’d had an extramarital affair. Gen. David Petraeus, as one press account put it, “was lauded as the greatest soldier-scholar of his generation, a highly decorated general who was as at home negotiating the intrigues of Washington as the trenches of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The “other woman” was Paula Broadwell, a married mother of two, close colleague and author of a laudatory biography of the general. Oh, and also a “super busy soccer mom” and all-round general great person.

In Paris they must be busily turning the pages now, looking for the rest of the story. Yes, OK, he had an affair … and? You mean that’s it? He didn’t murder her? Have three children that he kept in a secret location away from the press? Involve her in sex games with crowds of similarly liberated-minded partners? They had an affair and he has to quit as head of the CIA? Mon dieu, these Americans. Four hundred years in the New World and they’ve barely moved on from the Puritans. Look, they’re even shocked that the other woman appeared on television “sporting bare, toned arms”. What did they expect, a chador?

France has moved on marginally from the days when President Francois Mitterrand could have a whole secret second family, and no one mentioned it in public because it wouldn’t be polite. Now the press leaps happily onto news of sexual licence in the halls of power. Unlike the U.S., they just don’t condemn it, as long as no one is physically abused. The latest instance – they don’t even use the world scandal, because in France it isn’t — relates to the former justice minister, Rachida Dati, who is suing one of the country’s wealthiest men to try and force him to admit he’s the father of her new daughter. The case is a bit complicated because, as Ms. Dati attests, she has “a complicated private life.” That would include, according to the attorney for Dominique Desseigne, the alleged father, having eight lovers in the year she fell pregnant, “including a television broadcaster, a minister, a Qatari attorney-general and a brother of the former president Mr Sarkozy,” reports the French newspaper Le Monde.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the president at the time, and Ms. Dati’s boss. He wasn’t likely to be butting into her private life, though, having given up his own wife in favour of singer/model Carla Bruni. Ms. Bruni has recently been offering marital advice – as in “get married for Cripe sakes” – to Valerie Trierweiler, current First Partner-for-a-While to President Francois Hollande, who has four children by a previous Main Partner, Ségolène Royal. (Ms. Royal is only a Main Partner rather than a First Partner because Hollande wasn’t president at the time.) Dumping the mother of your four children for an uppity newspaper columnist like Ms. Trierweiler might offend sensibilities, but M. Hollande never married Ms. Royal either, so no big deal. Nonetheless Ms. Trieweiler has become deeply unpopular since moving into the presidential palace, because she refuses to give up her day job as a columnist and because she’s been rude to Ms. Royal. The messy sex stuff has nothing to do with it.

Compared to the Bacchanalia of French politics, the Petraeus “scandal” is like a high-school tiff over who gets to wear the football captain’s pin to the Prom. Unlike in France, everyone in this case is married: Petraeus to his wife of 38 years, who endured the constant absences that went with his rise through the military, other woman Paula Broadwell to a radiologist who is father to their two sons, and other other woman Jill Kelley, a Tampa State Department official who was allegedly the recipient of Broadwell’s alleged email warnings to “stay away” from Petraeus. Not only are they all married, they seem to be fine upstanding folks: according to Broadwell’s neighbours, she’s the sort of person Disney would cast to play a typical perfect suburban mother:

“Neighbours say Broadwell is the soccer mom, married to a radiologist, who serves her family dinner by candlelight and walks her two boys to the bus stop every morning before school. She is the nice woman in the two-story brick house who wore a costume to hand out candy on Halloween.

She is the friendly neighbour who organized an impromptu backyard barbecue to welcome newcomers to the neighbourhood. She is the super-busy woman who raises money for veterans’ support groups and takes time to mentor her friends’ children – especially girls – by reading their school papers and introducing them to soldiers they might interview.

“It wasn’t uncommon to look in their dining room at night and see the candles lit as they were eating,” said Sarah Curme, a neighbour and friend. “Nobody put Paula on a pedestal; it was more about Paula the neighbour, the mom and the wife than it was about everything else she did.”

Other than letting down their spouses, everyone in the Petraeus episode seems squeaky clean, if not inordinately so. Nobody’s even pregnant, or just back from an abortion. They’ll be shaking their heads even harder in France when they learn that. In Paris, the Petraeus affair wouldn’t even merit a news brief, much less a public shaming. They wouldn’t let either Petraeus or his paramour near the halls of French power. They’d just be too boring for French politics. Way too boring.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Bernard Arnault may be France’s richest man — and perhaps the fourth-richest person in the world — but his wealth can’t protect him from the slings and arrows of his outraged compatriots.

The news he has applied for Belgian nationality has been met with outrage, from politicians and journalists of all stripes.

They accuse him of being unpatriotic and avoiding taxes, after President François Hollande announced he planned to sock it to the rich, with a 75% levy on all income over one million euros.

It’s not the first time the boss of luxury goods firm LVMH has pulled this caper. He moved to the United States in the early 1980s during the regime of the last socialist president François Mitterrand. But Belgium is an insult too far, even though pop star Johnny Hallyday blazed the way by moving there.
Arnault has also given the story extra legs by suing the left-wing newspaper Libération for its cheeky headline, “Get lost, you rich bastard.” Here’s the offending front page.

“Even if he defends the move for financial reasons, Bernard Arnault’s application for Belgian citizenship looks like another example of the egotism of the very rich,” the paper adds.

The headline is actually a play on a famous gaffe made by the former president, Nicholas Sarkozy, who muttered “casse-toi, pov’ con” (“get lost, you poor bastard”) at a member of the public who refused to shake his hand. The phrase subsequently became a taunt taken up by Sarkozy’s left-wing opponents.

French politicians are lining up to condemn Arnault. In an interview with Le Point, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, said she was

shocked and accused him of giving “a very bad example … How can we explain to people who want to immigrate and are looking for a French passport only for economic reasons that this is unacceptable when the world’s fourth-richest businessman is doing exactly the same thing?”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who ran as the extreme left presidential candidate, told Le Figaro the LVMH head was “a parasite … The rich, important people the powerful have no country but money. They do not love their motherland.”

Bernard Tapie, a businessman and Sarkozy supporter , was similarly outraged in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper:

I can’t believe it … France owes him a lot, but he also owes a lot to France. The state notably helped him financially [in 1984]. When you’re the citizen of a country, you need to know how to enjoy the nice sides, but also to accept those which are less so. As a symbol, this would be a catastrophe.

Thomas Adamson at The Associated Press, believes Arnault’s defection is a blow to France’s amour-propre.

Bernard Arnault — the richest man in Europe — has ignited an uproar in France over taxes, citizenship, patriotism and what policies the government needs to promote growth.
It’s a pretty impressive achievement for one little statement.
Arnault — the CEO of French fashion giant LVMH, owner of houses Louis Vuitton— the richest man in Europe —and Christian Dior — is the symbol of France’s treasured luxury fashion industry.
So when the face of “Made in France” confirmed that he had applied for dual citizenship in Belgium it struck deep chord in France’s national pride.

Far be it from us to wonder why Mr. Arnault—in a borderless single market—would need a Belgian passport to do business or see his relatives in Belgium. His company insists he will continue to pay taxes in France, where the pre-Hollande top income rate was 46.8%, compared to 53.7% in Belgium.
But if the billionaire’s sudden passion for Trappist beer and good chocolate has caught French imaginations, it’s because it reminds them that tax rates matter. French President François Hollande has made no secret of either his personal dislike of the rich or of his desire to squeeze them for all they’re worth. Now the rich are making it clear they don’t intend to get squeezed if they can help it.

Then there’s the view of the taxation specialists consulted by Robert Frank at CNBC.

Tax lawyers say they are hard-pressed to find the tax benefits of Arnault’s proposed Belgian citizenship if he remains a tax resident. In France, tax obligations are determined by residency rather than citizenship.
Arnault says he will remain a resident of France, so he would still be subject to all or nearly all French taxes, lawyers say …

In fact, Belgium’s income-tax rate of more than 50% is currently higher than France’s rate of around 45%. Lawyers say that if Arnault wanted to change his residency to avoid French taxes, he could become a Belgian resident at any time without becoming a Belgian citizen, which is far more difficult.

Police raided the home and offices of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday as part of a judicial inquiry into financial relations between his political camp and the richest woman in France, L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

It was Sarkozy’s first legal tangle since he was unseated in a May 6 election after five years in office, during which he enjoyed presidential immunity from legal pursuit. That cover expired in mid-June.

Sarkozy’s lawyer, Thierry Herzog, said the raids a day after his client had left for Canada on holiday would show nothing and that he had already supplied information to investigators that debunked suspicions of secret meetings with Bettencourt.

Related

“These raids … will as expected prove futile,” Herzog said in a statement.

The Bettencourt probe centers on financial relations between Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party and the billionaire heiress of the L’Oreal cosmetics empire. In one strand, investigators are trying to establish whether Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign in particular was funded illicitly.

Herzog said magistrates looking into whether Sarkozy had received campaign funds from the now mentally fragile Bettencourt had been supplied with diary details of all Sarkozy appointments in 2007.

Those details, he said, “prove that the purported ‘secret meetings’ with Madame Liliane Bettencourt were impossible”.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who ruled France from 1995 to 2007, was handed a two-year suspended jail sentence in December after a court found him guilty of misusing public funds for political purposes when he was mayor of Paris.

Francois Hollande, who unseated Sarkozy in May, has vowed to change the rules in France under his tenure so that the law no longer treats presidents differently from other civilians regarding matters that predate their time in office.

The 57-year-old Sarkozy, who has adopted a low profile since his defeat, faces a number of legal tangles now that he is no longer head of state.

Days after his constitutionally guaranteed immunity expired in mid-June, a lawyer announced a formal legal complaint in another affair with a political funding link in which he wants Sarkozy to answer questions.

That complaint came from a lawyer acting for victims of a 2002 bombing in Karachi that investigators believe may be linked to a long-running corruption and illegal party-financing case.

In the so-called “Karachi Affair”, investigators are trying to unravel dealings by middlemen and possible kickbacks linked to France’s sale of Agosta class submarines to Pakistan in the 1990s.

That contract was negotiated and signed while Sarkozy was a minister and spokesman for a politician who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1995, Edouard Balladur.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/nicolas-sarkozys-home-raided-by-french-police-in-probe-into-funding-scandal/feed7stdThe new offices of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris was searched as part of their probe into claims he was involved in illegal political campaign financing.French voters get a wake-up call via harsh message on national financeshttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/french-voters-get-a-wake-up-call-via-harsh-message-on-national-finances
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/french-voters-get-a-wake-up-call-via-harsh-message-on-national-finances#commentsTue, 03 Jul 2012 17:13:42 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=83677

If French voters thought they were winning themselves a reprieve from tough medicine by defeating Nicolas Sarkozy and replacing him with the socialist Francois Hollande, they got a rude awakening on Monday.

Didier Migaud, head of the Cour des Compes, warned that the national economy is bordering on disaster and will “require both an unprecedented curb on public expenditure and an increase in taxes.”

“The country is in the danger zone in terms of its economy and public finances. We cannot rule out the possibility of a debt spiral,” said Migaud, equivalent to the national auditor. “2013 is a crucial year. The budgetary equation is going to be very hard: much harder than expected due to the worsening of the economic picture.”

At a press conference laden with gloom, Mr. Migaud noted the budget situation left behind by Mr. Sarkozy was worse than the new government had expected. It’s an old trick of new governments to throw up their hands in shock once they take office and get a look at the books. Right on cue, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault issued a statement making clear that it would be Mr. Sarkozy’s fault if the new administration is forced to abandon the promises it made on the campaign trail.

“The state of the public finances left by the last government makes determined correctional action necessary,” he said.

President Francois Hollande ordered up the auditor’s report after defeating Mr. Sarkozy in May. France aims to reduce its budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product next year and eliminate the deficit by 2017. To meet that target, Mr. Migaud estimated savings of 33 billion euros would be necessary and suggested public debt could reach 90% of GDP this year. According to Britain’s Financial Times, he “pulled few punches on the country’s ‘far from exemplary record’ on its public finances, noting that it lagged far behind Germany – and that Italy and Spain had made twice the effort on their deficits.”

The report canvassed a number of scenarios for cutting spending, saying that if the €33bn in savings was split evenly between cuts and taxes, the required figure could be reached by freezing state spending in real terms.

It pointed out that state salaries accounted for 13.6 per cent of GDP, saying meeting deficit targets implied the need to stabilise this figure in nominal terms. It said there was a strong need for efficiencies in the disbursement of a range of social spending and other transfer programmes which accounted for €620bn out of total public expenditure of €1.1tn.

“In health, education, vocational training, for example, France spends much more than other countries where the outcome in these areas is considerably better than ours,” Mr Migaud said.

Keeping track of the sexual politics within France’s ruling elite must be like trying to track of who’s bonking who on Mad Men. Even experienced observers could be excused if it took them a while to unravel all the strands involved in the complex private life of the latest president, Francois Hollande.

The funny thing is that, until he was elected president, Hollande was generally criticized as too bland. Balding, bespectacled, he could pass as an understudy to George Costanza on Seinfeld. Other than acting as “ex-officio co-prince of Andorra,” which must be kinky, he never seems to have done anything but run for office or work for politicians. But even the remotest link to power seems to act as an aphrodisiac in France, and so the new president’s first big controversy has nothing to do with Europe’s possible imminent demise, but with a tweeting snit by his new First Partner. (No one in France ever actually gets married. That would be so Second Empire.)

The new partner, Valerie Trierweiler, is allegedly jealous of the old partner, Segolene Royal. And why not? Francois and Segolene were partners for 30 years and have four children. Francois was there when Segolene ran for president, losing to Nicolas Sarkozy. They split up soon after, and it was Francois who ran against Sarkozy when Sarkozy’s first term was up. He won, of course, making Segolene look bad.

You’d think that would be enough for Valerie, but these things run deep. She’s stuck with Francois and Segolene’s four kids, all of whom discovered they had better things to do than attend his inauguration. Plus, Francois has been out campaigning for Segolene as she seeks a seat in the French parliament. That was too much for Trierweiler, who fired off what Britain’s Telegraph called “a single explosive tweet” praising Segolene’s opponent:

“Good luck to Olivier Falorni who has done nothing worthy of blame, who has fought alongside the people of La Rochelle for so many years with selfless commitment.”

Holy catfight Batman. The new president is now embroiled in what the Paris daily Liberation labelled “France’s first gaffe”.

But why Hollande should be different is unclear. The last time France had a socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, he maintained an entire separate family. Everyone knew, but no one said a word until he’d been in office for 13 years – which is one big difference from current associate wives, who can flounce around in public all they want.

Mazarine Pingeot, Mitterrand’s daughter with his mistress, wrote a book about how she felt guilty when the secret was revealed. She used to hide in the back seat when the limo would take her and her mother to visit the president at the Elysee palace.

“Officially I didn’t have a father. My classmates knew nothing of what went on at home, my evenings, my weekends, my holidays. Or if they knew they said nothing.

“The pact of silence wasn’t just a family affair. Apparently all the world had signed up to it.”

At Sarkozy’s inauguration, all of his children turned up with his wife Cecilia. Actually, Cecilia was his second wife; he met her while officiating at her marriage to someone else. They both had affairs before he became president, and, soon after getting elected, they dumped one another and Sarkozy upgraded to model/singer Carla Bruni, who was nonetheless compared unflatteringly to Trierweiler when she appeared at the presidential handover looking pudgy in “an ill-fitting suit that would not have looked out of place on a bank clerk.”

The French, of course, look down on the Americans, who tend to glorify the First Lady, as if merely being married to the president made her somehow special. And they’re so Puritan in those English-speaking countries. Imagine, the other day the British Prime Minister and his wife forgot their eight-year-old daughter in a pub, and went home without her. Such a fuss. In France that would never happen. First of all, why take along the child, when you could leave her with your mistress?

PARIS — Socialist President François Hollande looked set to consolidate his grip on power with a left-wing majority in parliament after a first-round vote on Sunday, and may be able to govern without relying on hard leftists hostile to closer European integration.

Initial projections by polling agencies based on a partial vote count suggested his core Socialist bloc could win 283 to 329 seats in the 577-member National Assembly in next Sunday’s runoff, shifting the lower house to the left for the first time in a decade.

Related

With Greens allies, the left would have 295 to 347 seats, the CSA polling institute forecast, well ahead of the mainstream conservatives with 210 to 263 seats, and more than the outright majority of 289 needed to give Hollande a free hand.

The Ipsos institute drew similar conclusions from its own projections based on a partial vote count, while TNS Sofres was the only pollster that put the Socialists and Greens just short of an absolute majority in a worst-case scenario.

The vote was another symbolic advance for the left after it took control of the Senate in 2011 and won the presidency in May for the first time since 1988.

A low turnout of less than 60 percent, which analysts say plays against the left, could still curb what might have been a bigger triumph for Hollande as he seeks to steer France through the euro zone’s debt crisis.

“There is a winner on the left, but not a big winner. It is a relative majority and not an absolute majority. In a crisis there was a need for an absolute majority,” said analyst Stephane Rozes at the CAP political consultancy.

Hollande, who won the presidency as much due to a rejection of conservative Nicolas Sarkozy and his inability to curb raging unemployment as on his own merit, needs to be able to rule unfettered as he prepares budget adjustments in Europe’s second-biggest economy, including possible spending cuts.

He is also under pressure from Berlin to agree to hand European Union institutions more control over national budgets and move towards a fiscal union – measures that would be opposed by the Communists and the hard Left Party in parliament.

The parliamentary balance is hard to predict accurately because any candidate winning more than 12.5 percent of registered voters can go through to the June 17 second round, meaning three candidates may face off in many constituencies.

The far-right National Front won about 13.4 percent of the popular vote, less than its leader Marine Le Pen’s 17.9 percent presidential score, and is projected to have have at most three deputies. The anti-immigration party will be present in fewer runoffs than it had hoped due to the low turnout.

In the short term, the lower house will be called on to vote on tweaks to the 2012 budget and tax increases for the rich as Hollande seeks to implement a tax-and-spend programme that aims to create jobs without imposing Greek-style austerity.

“There are already so many taxes in France. It’s hard enough to run your own business as it is and with the Socialists there will just be more taxes,” Cambodian-born Sor Chin-Run said as he voted for a conservative candidate in the eastern Doubs region.

Conservative lawmakers would probably vote against tax increases, though they could back legislation to ratify a European budget responsibility pact that the far left opposes.

Hollande can count on his strongly pro-European Green allies to back most of his legislation.

NUMBERS GAME

Sunday’s vote was marked by a low turnout, which had reached just 48.31 percent at 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) after a day of drizzle, down from 49.28 percent in the 2007 parliamentary vote.

Abstention in legislative elections have soared since France synchronised the presidential and parliamentary terms a decade ago, hitting 40 percent in 2007. “This whole process is too long,” 76-year-old Jean-Louis Bertrandy said at a voting station in Paris.

The Senate, parliament’s upper house, has been under left-wing control since late 2011. Hollande needs at least 289 seats to enjoy a parallel majority in the lower house.

Hollande, who unseated conservative Nicolas Sarkozy on May 6, needs all the help he can get as he lobbies Berlin for a pro-growth pact to accompany a budget responsibility treaty.

In the past few days, Merkel has made signing up for an eventual fiscal union in Europe her condition for agreeing to Hollande’s pro-growth ideas and calls by Paris, Madrid and others for a bank-sector union and the issuance of common bonds.

In one of Sunday’s most high-profile battles, Le Pen bested hard leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon in Henin-Beaumont in the northern Calais region, and a Socialist candidate may pip the Left Party leader for second place on the ballot for round two.

In another closely watched race, Hollande’s former partner Segolene Royal, who ran for president in 2007, was narrowly ahead of a maverick leftist rival in the western seaside town of La Rochelle and faces a difficult three-way runoff.

That was a good answer Stephen Harper gave to Peter Mansbridge the other day. Asked how Europe, as it seeks a way out of its current crisis, could have “both austerity and growth at the same time,” the prime minister rightly denied there was a contradiction. Both are necessary, and both are possible.

Certainly austerity, or what he preferred to call “fiscal discipline,” was unavoidable: “You can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis.” But more growth was not synonymous with more public spending, as in the simple Keynesian model that dominates media thinking about economics. Rather, he prescribed a range of measures to “increase the growth capacity” of the economy: expanded trade, more flexible labour markets, higher productivity.

The prime minister, in short, was endorsing the pre-crisis orthodoxy, that the business of macroeconomics, fiscal and monetary policy, is stability — that is, keeping demand for goods and services growing in line with the economy’s capacity to supply them. Growth, on the other hand, is best thought of as a question of microeconomics: finding and removing the barriers, regulatory or other, that prevent markets from allocating productive resources efficiently, with a view to expanding capacity….

PARIS — Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for an overhaul to the euro zone Thursday and urged European leaders to move “decisively” to resolve the economic crisis that has gripped the continent before the contagion spreads to the entire world.

The prime minister made the public plea after meeting with François Hollande — the newly elected French president who has rejected international pressure to impose austerity and has moved instead to provide a more generous pension system for some of his citizens.

Harper said Europe must fix the structural weaknesses of the 17-nation eurozone that make the monetary system unable to adapt to crises.

Insisting he’s not saying anything that others don’t already know, Harper said the eurozone and European Union lack the “strong institutional structures” that normally are associated with a monetary union.

“I think most observers recognize that these things have to change. This is kind of a half-done project. As long as it ís a half-done project, they lack the tool to deal with crises.”

Harper acknowledged that it is not a simple problem, nor will it be easy to fix.

“But we don’t have years to fix this problem,” Harper told a news conference. “There has to be a plan.”

“As I told the president, theyíre not going to have growth in Europe unless they establish some confidence in markets. And itís going to be very difficult to establish confidence without a plan to address some of these issues and some of these structural issues.”

Harper confirmed that during their 45-minute meeting at the French presidential palace, the two men discussed the increasing uncertainty about the future of Europe — whether the continent can prevent its economy from falling into further collapse and whether the eurozone currency can be kept alive.

Afterwards, speaking to journalists, Harperís frustrations with the lack of action by Europe was evident.

“My position has been very clear,” said Harper, who began urging Europe last year to get its debt crisis under control.

“Over the past year, as you know, the Europeans have taken a number of short-term steps to deal with problems that have come up. And they have continued to successfully avoid some kind of catastrophic event.

“But, as you know, the overall situation has worsened, and I emphasize once again the necessity of acting decisively to contain this problem before it becomes a true global crisis.”

Harperís trip to Europe comes at a crucial juncture in the history of the continent.

Greece goes to the polls June 17, and itís possible voters will elect a party that has spurned the austerity measures proposed by the previous government in return for a bailout by the rest of Europe. If that happens, Greece will almost surely leave the eurozone, potentially causing both political and financial upheaval.

Related

Europe’s political leaders are searching desperately for a consensus on how to face that scenario and the possibility that other debt-ridden nations — such as Spain — will experience a collapse of their banking system.

Earlier this week, Harper had dinner in London with British Prime Minister David Cameron, a fellow Conservative who has preached the importance of governments imposing austerity to control their debt.

But when Harper sat down Thursday with Hollande, the scenario was much different.

Hollande, a socialist, won power recently by promising voters he would reject the austerity policies of his rival, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Indeed, the ideological gulf between Harper was drawn into sharp view just a day before Thursdayís meeting.

On Wednesday, Hollande unveiled plans to lower the retirement age to 60 from 62 for some French workers. He was fulfilling an election promise and reversing reforms instituted by Sarkozy.

When Sarkozy moved in 2010 to raise the retirement age to 62, there were strikes across the country, primarily by public sector workers.

Under Hollande’s plan, people who started working at the age of 18 can claim a pension at 60 instead of 62.

The change is expected to cost €1.1-billion next year, rising to €3-billion in 2017.

By comparison, Harperís government is moving in the opposite direction on pension reform.

Earlier this year, during a speech in Davos, Switzerland, he signalled that the costs associated with Canadaís aging population could imperil the countryís economic future unless they are brought under control.

This year’s budget announced that future seniors will have to wait longer to claim their pensions. Starting in 2023, the eligibility age for the Old Age Security benefit will gradually be raised to 67 from 65.

Harper dismissed suggestions Thursday that there is a policy gulf between him and Hollande on pensions, saying that France is merely instituting a scheme that is available to Canadians who collect the Canada Pension Plan as early as age 61.

“I think we have to be clear what we are doing in Canada, which is very different than most countries,” said Harper.

“We are balancing our budget over the next couple of years. We have been reducing it over the past couple of years. And we are doing so without reducing our pensions, without reducing payments to our senior citizens at all.”

“Changes we are looking at for Old Age Security donít even begin to come into effect until 2023.”

Later in the day, Harper met with businessmen. He told them that he and Hollande had discussed the ongoing negotiations that Canada has been having with the European Union to strike a free-trade agreement.

“It continues to go very well,” said Harper, adding that both he and Hollande are determined to reach a deal this year.

“Thatís our objective. It’s important for both of our countries to send a strong signal to the international economy that Canada, France, Europe — we all are very focused very much on jobs and economic growth.”